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Letter From The Editor Opinion

Prickly City

Irish poet Oscar Wilde opined in his 1899 essay, “The Decay of Lying,” that “Life imitates art far more than art imitates life.” The shortened version of Wilde’s quote — life imitates art — has become something of a go-to aphorism in the ensuing decades. But it seems to me life is no longer imitating art so much as it is imitating a reprise of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, and we’ve all fallen down the rabbit hole.

How else to explain the bizarre phenomenon of Fox News spending countless hours of airtime last week on the decision by the publishers of the Dr. Seuss children’s books to not reprint six titles because they contained ethnically insensitive or xenophobic content? You can easily look up the images in question online. They’re mainly racial-stereotype caricatures that were commonly used in the 1930s and 1940s, and it’s pretty understandable why the books wouldn’t be reprinted in 2021.

But that reasoning doesn’t adequately stoke the Fox News outrage machine. Nope. The real reason Seuss books are going away is because of liberal “cancel culture,” the current rallying cry of the snowflake right. To their credit, it’s a useful phrase, really, one that can be applied to almost anything that is stopped or rejected.

The Commercial Appeal, for instance, has just replaced its long-running conservative cartoon, Mallard Fillmore (which “balanced” Doonesbury), with another conservative political cartoon, Prickly City, which features the adventures of a conservative young Black woman who once fell in love with Tucker Carlson. I am not making this up. Unless Wikipedia made it up.

At any rate, letter writers to the CA are predictably complaining that lame duck (literally) Mallard Fillmore is the victim of cancel culture. The truth is less outrageous: The editors at the CA, a privately owned company, decided to pull one conservative cartoon and replace it with another one. It’s kind of like when Beverly Hill SVU (or whatever) gets the axe from CBS.

Or like when thousands of Fox viewers demanded the resignation of Shepard Smith when he came out as gay. Or was that different?

But wait, there’s more. It turns out that the ancient plastic toy, Mr. Potato Head, is also a victim of cancel culture. And also the subject of many hours of pearl-clutching commentary in conservative media circles. How dare they remove the fedora and mustache of Mr. Potato Head?! What’s next, G.I. Josephine?

It’s kind of like when conservatives went nuts and boycotted the Dixie Chicks after they criticized George W. Bush. Or was that different?

Cancel culture has also become the rallying cry of conservative Republicans on Capitol Hill. Last week, in referencing public attitudes toward COVID, President Biden said, “The last thing we need is Neanderthal thinking, that in the meantime everything’s fine, take off your mask. Forget it. It still matters.” The nerve!

Thankfully, our own Senator Marsha Blackburn was quickly on the case, defending the downtrodden Neanderthal people on Fox News: “Neanderthals are hunter-gatherers. They’re protectors of their family,” she said. “They are resilient. They’re resourceful. They tend to their own. Joe Biden needs to rethink what he is saying.”

No one had the heart to tell Marsha that Neanderthals have been extinct for a few thousand years. I mean, except for a few descendents in Congress, the ones who tried to cancel the last election. Or was that cancellation different?

Senator Ted Cruz asked Attorney General nominee Merrick Garland how he felt about cancel culture in a Senate hearing. Garland responded: “I do not have an understanding of the meaning of the term sufficient to comment.” Which sounds about right.

Shouty Ohio Congressman Jim Jordan demanded that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi hold a congressional hearing on the pressing national crisis of cancel culture. She ignored him, thereby missing a golden opportunity to schedule such a hearing and then cancel it at the last moment.

That would have been artful.

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

Snowblind: Our Vision May at Long Last Be Returning

Yes, it was one hell of a week, literally.

I was put in mind of a situation five years ago involving a couple of the bad actors we heard so much about this past week. Of the seven times I’ve been able, on behalf of this newspaper, to travel to New Hampshire during a presidential caucus and to report on it from there, the occasion of 2016 was most brutal, weather-wise, with temperatures always in the oughts or teens.

Jackson Baker

Ted Cruz drew big in a blizzard in 2016.

On the first night I was there, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, one of the leading Republican candidates then (and the protagonist of this week’s “Flyin’ Ted” melodrama), happened to be having a town hall in Dover, where I was holed up, on the state’s southern rim. Cruz, who at the time was Donald Trump‘s best positioned GOP rival, also happened to be doing his thing in a sleet storm.

Inching along cravenly in my rental car on streets of ice, being honked at by locals who somehow were able to whiz by me, it took me more than an hour to get to the site, which was only blocks away. When I got there, I was astounded at the size of an overflow crowd, eager (or curious) to hear Cruz’s sternly right-wing views.

Every venture I undertook anywhere that week to catch up with the candidates, Democrat and Republican, I experienced as a life-and-death matter. I fell on the ice and almost broke my back at a Hillary Clinton event. The climax of the week was a 26-mile trek in a bona fide blizzard to Manchester, the state capital, to catch frontrunner Trump’s performance at a downtown auditorium.

The candidate was an hour late, and came in complaining about the blizzard and the many traffic accidents it had already caused. He tough-loved the crowd: “You have to do me a favor. I don’t really care if you get hurt or not, but I want you to last till tomorrow. So don’t get hurt!” The crowd loved it and reveled even more when Trump agreed with a woman supporter’s shout that opponent Cruz was “a pussy.”

The sadomasochism of the thing — of the whole week, actually — was in retrospect a perfect precursor for the four years that were to come. Survival of the fittest, every man for himself, trust to your luck and pluck. All that.

And there was the moment, over this past weekend, when I finally hazarded a trip out of the house, hopeful of buying some bottled water. I didn’t make it the first time or two. Not only was the still-unthawed ice too rough in the sloped part of my driveway, but as I looked around at the expanse of snow all around me, the glare of all that empty crystallized whiteness seemed about to annihilate my field of vision. And I suddenly knew what the term “snow-blind” meant.

Eventually I would get out and get my water, not at a store (they were out) but through the kindness of a friend. Eventually the ice would begin to melt and the stressful whiteness of the landscape would begin to fill in with renewed color. This may not seem to be much of an epiphany, but it happened simultaneously with, or in the wake of, the decision of city and county governments to open new vaccination sites and, of all overdue things, to offer guaranteed vaccine doses to the public school teachers who had been expected, martyr-like, to rush back to in-person teaching without them.

On Monday, the County Commission was scheduled to strike down residential requirements for the hiring of a new corps of vaccine workers to augment and step up the vaccination process.

In Washington, a new president, with a new commitment to the role of government in sheltering the lives and livelihoods of citizens, began to roll out an enhanced COVID-19 plan — a national plan, at last! — and declared, as well, a resolve to fix a cruel and xenophobic immigration system and a commitment to a stimulus plan capable, perhaps, of restoring a bleached-out nation’s economic hopes and of returning it to normalcy. Yes, the plan is ample, having what County Commissioner Reginald Milton says is the “girth” that government needs to survive lean times.

In many ways, the snow is melting, and our vision, fixed too long in icy indifference, may be returning.

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

Early Voting Numbers Skew Democratic, Black, and Older

Some fun facts: According to the calculations of Election Commissioner Bennie Smith, a statistician and professional elections analyst, some 81,000 voters took part in the early voting period in Shelby County, and the voting skewed Democratic, female, African-American, and relatively elderly.

The final voting figures as of Saturday, August 1st, were 54,400 Democratic, 25,800 Republican; 50,500 female, 30,500 male; 34,400 Black, 26,200 white, and 26,200 other. Of the 81,000 voters, some 69,900 were over the age of 50.

That last figure illustrates the disproportionate tendency of older voters to take part in elections, inasmuch as the over-50 segment of the society as a whole is only 45 percent. The average age of an eligible voter in Shelby County is 48.20.

by Gender

The eligible voting population comprises roughly 331,000 females and 240,000 males, a split of 57.97 percent to 42.03 percent. Ethnically, the voting population includes 199,000 African Americans, 139,000 whites, and 233,000 who consider themselves “other.” As the last week of the August 6th election round began, candidates were putting their best surrogates on display — hitchhiking, as it were, on other, better established, or more well-known political figures.

In the case of Tom Leatherwood, a Republican running for re-election to the state House of Representatives from District 99 (Eads, Arlington, eastern Shelby), the doppelgänger was Governor Bill Lee, down from Nashville. The two held forth to a sizable late-Monday-morning crowd at Olympic Steak and Pizza in Arlington, while partisans of Leatherwood’s GOP primary opponent, former Shelby County Republican chairman Lee Mills, picketed outside.

A little later on Monday, U.S. Senate candidate Manny Sethi, a Nashville physician and Republican newcomer who styles himself “Dr. Manny,” hit the stage of another well-attended event at The Grove in Cordova. He had in tow U.S. Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, and Sethi, who is opposed by former Ambassador Bill Hagerty, a Trump endorsee, fairly quickly disposed of any idea that he might be the moderate in the race.

“I’m tired of this coronavirus, aren’t you?” Sethi said, addressing a seated crowd of which roughly a third were maskless. “Let’s fire Dr. Fauci!” he continued, going on to endorse the glories of hydroxychloroquine, the anti-malaria drug President Trump has touted as a potential antidote to COVID-19.

James Mackler, a Democratic candidate in the Senate race, has condemned Sethi’s position as one making him unworthy of serving in the Senate.

Sethi is one of two physicians in the Senate race. The other, Republican George Flinn of Memphis, has denounced Trump’s response to the coronavirus pandemic as being woefully insufficient.

Categories
Politics Politics Beat Blog

“Fire Fauci!” — Candidates Call on High-Powered Surrogates

As the last week of the August 6th election round began, candidates were racing around putting their best surrogates on display — hitchhiking, as it were, on other, better established or more well-known political figures.
JB

Leatherwood (l) with Lee

In the case of Tom Leatherwood, a Republican running for reelection to the state House of Representatives from District 99 (Eads, Arlington, eastern Shelby), the doppelgänger was Governor Bill Lee, down from Nashville. The two held forth before a sizable late-Monday-morning crowd at Olympic Steak and Pizza in Arlington, while partisans of Leatherwood’s GOP primary opponent, former Shelby County Republican chairman Lee Mills, picketed outside.

Slightly later on Monday, U.S. Senate candidate Manny Sethi, a Nashville physician and Republican newcomer who styles himself “Dr. Manny,” hit the stage of another well-attended event, this one at The Grove, an establishment in Cordova. He had in tow U.S. Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, and Sethi, who is opposed by former Ambassador Bill Hagerty, a Trump endorsee, fairly quickly disposed of any idea that he might be the moderate in the race.

JB

Sethi (r) with Cruz

“I’m tired of this coronavirus, aren’t you?” Sethi said, addressing a seated crowd of which roughly a third were maskless. “Let’s fire Dr. Fauci!” he continued, going on to endorse the glories of hydroxychloroquine, the anti-malaria drug President Trump has touted as a potential antidote to Covid-19.

James Mackler, a Democratic candidate in the Senate race, has condemned Sethi’s position as one making him unworthy of serving in the Senate.

Sethi is one of two physicians in the Senate race. The other, Republican George Flinn of Memphis, has denounced Trump’s response to the coronavirus pandemic as being woefully insufficient.

Meanwhile, Democratic state Representative Joe Towns, bidding for reelection in District 84, was the beneficiary of a Monday fundraiser at India Palace on Poplar. Towns had asked both Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland and Shelby County Mayor Lee Harris to be on hand. Strickland was able to make it, Harris was not. JB

Mills’ picketers at Leatherwood event.

Categories
Letter From The Editor Opinion

Tigers, Redbirds, Trump, Porn, and Co-Yo

What a week it was. The football Tigers beat UCLA using a combination of great offense, timely defense, and good ol’ Mid-South heat and humidity. Those California dudes never knew what hit ’em.

And the Memphis Redbirds won the Pacific Coast League championship, beating out all the other teams on the Pacific Coast, including the Nashville Sounds, El Paso Chihuahuas, Omaha Storm Chasers, and the fearsome New Orleans Baby Cakes.

To sum it up: Memphis 2, “Pacific Coast” 0.

It was a week where I found myself agreeing with Donald Trump, at least for a few hours. After a Wednesday night meeting with Democratic Congressional leaders, “Cryin’ Chuck” Schumer and Nancy Pelosi, Trump began his Thursday morning by tweeting: “Does anybody really want to throw out good, educated, and accomplished young people who have jobs, some serving in the military? Really!” Followed by: “They have been in our country for many years through no fault of their own — brought in by parents at young age.”

The paleo wing of the GOP went nuts. Ann Coulter tweeted, “Who doesn’t want to impeach Trump?” Sean Hannity blamed it all on Mitch McConnell for “forcing” his hero to “work with Democrats.”

Trump had seemingly done a complete flip-flop on DACA overnight. My guess is that Pelosi shook Trump’s hand and said, “Oh my, it’s so BIG!!” and Trump agreed to everything she asked, including a deal to save the Dreamers and turn the border wall into a cheery Tex-Mex restaurant.

Sadly, the “deal” only lasted a few hours, and Trump quickly deleted his tweets.

So it goes with this guy. Save DACA. Eliminate DACA. Build the wall, and the Mexicans will pay for it. The wall’s already being built, and we’ll bill Mexico later. Wall? What wall? Trump is a presidential pinball, caroming from one “decision” to another, depending on the last player who flips him.

So what else happened? Oh yeah, Ted Cruz got caught watching porn, or better said, “liking” a porn video with his Twitter account. The New Yorker‘s Andy Borowitz tweeted: “Porn Industry Irrevocably Damaged by Association with Ted Cruz.” Cruz blamed it on his staff, of course. His staff. Huh-huh.

The Emmys happened. Alec Baldwin won an award for his Saturday Night Live impression of Trump. Kate McKinnon won for her SNL impression of Hillary Clinton. And America wept, thinking either of these two comedians would probably make a better president than what we’ve got. Then Sean Spicer got up and reprised his acting gig from the actual White House, and the already fuzzy line between reality and comedy was blurred beyond recognition.

What else? Oh yeah, Trump supporters held the “Mother of All Rallies” in Washington, D.C., on Saturday. About 800 people showed up. Which, as someone pointed out on Twitter, is what happens when you name your march after Mike Pence’s wife. The MOAR crowd was outnumbered by a marching contingent of Juggalos, who are fans of the band, Insane Clown Posse. Write your own Trump joke. You can’t make this stuff up. Though I kind of wish you could.

Back in Memphis, 130,000 people attended the Cooper-Young Festival. I heard a record 37,000 windchimes were sold. I also heard we’re supposed to call Cooper-Young “Co-Yo” now. And I got this from a beardy guy drinking a craft beer, so it must be true.

Overton Park Conservancy director Tina Sullivan went to the Co-Yo Fest and tweeted: “Highlight of this year’s CY Fest was the elderly gentleman asking my opinion on public nudity & saying he might organize a Naked Bike Ride.”

First, I’d like to say that I’m not that “elderly.” And second, I think we should do it around the Nathan Bedford Forrest statue as it’s being taken down.

And in a final somber note to a weird week, British writer Kathy Lette wrote: “Sad news. I’ve just heard that the bloke who invented predictive text has pissed away. His funfair is next monkey.”

Categories
Editorial Opinion

After the Conventions: On the Plus Side

The Republicans and Democrats have each held their quadrennial conventions and certified their nominees. As tradition would have it, now the American people can sink back into a late-summer torpor, not to fasten their attentions on presidential politics again until Labor Day.

Something tells us this will not be the case in 2016. For one thing, the murderous outrages inflicted on the world by the Islamic State (or, more likely, by copycat amateurs inspired by ISIS) have been happening with such ominous regularity of late that it is hard to imagine the perpetrators humoring the rest of us with a siesta period. And, given both the volume of combustible rhetoric among the Republicans at Cleveland and the resort to something remarkably like jingoism on the Democrats’ last day at Philadelphia, any new international incident or act of terror could swing the sentiment of this country’s voters in an unexpected direction.

In other words, watch out for sudden volatility and mood swings among the electorate. Whatever the polls are telling us about the probable election outcome at any given time is likely, to use the catchphrase of another not-so-distant political time, to become “inoperative.”

Meanwhile, let us take such comfort as we can. There were some silver linings in the storm clouds emanating from the pumped-up oratory of the conventions. The much-vaunted “social issues” that have distorted relations between persons and institutions and classes and tainted our nation’s politics for a generation or more may at last be on the way out. Give Donald Trump this: For all the patent demagoguery that has fueled his unexpected rise to political prominence, The Donald deserves some props for a tip of the hat in his acceptance address to a community of fellow citizens hitherto ignored or ostracized by his party (as they still are in the Comstockian language of the Republican platform). However awkward his bingo-call enunciation of the letters LGBTQ was, he crossed a threshold by the straightforwardness of his acknowledgment. The presence on the GOP dais of an openly avowed gay entrepreneur was another welcome move in that direction.

And on the Democratic side, that glass ceiling of gender discrimination has been exploded at last —by a woman whose personal prowess is so undeniable that even her political enemies have to magnify their claims of high crimes and misdemeanors in an effort to neutralize her. As state Representative Raumesh Akbari of Memphis told the Democratic convention proudly, Hillary Clinton, like her or not, is one bad sister!

One last threshold whose crossing is deserving of mention: There was a time when the word “socialist” was as disqualifying as any word in the American political lexicon. Through his steadfast and spot-on criticisms of the economic inequalities afflicting this nation, Senator Bernie Sanders gave the term new legitimacy and made enough converts to come narrowly close to winning his party’s nomination. Especially given the youthfulness of the new cadres that felt the Bern this year, the chances are excellent that, in election years to come, the economic facts of life can be faced and discussed squarely, without having to work around outmoded taboos in the political vocabulary.

Categories
Opinion The Last Word

Dear God … Why Prince?

Dear, God …

No, I’m not just saying “Dear, God” to be saying it. I’m writing an open letter. So here goes.

Dear, God, at this point I’m just pissed off. If you are indeed real, are you the one running this universe? Are you the one aligning or misaligning the planets? Are you the one who let Merle Haggard and David Bowie both die earlier this year — on their birthdays, no less? And now Prince? PRINCE? At age 57?

Mark Milstein | Dreamstime.com

Prince

What in God’s name (Oops! Sorry!) were you thinking? Have you lost your mind? I know you have that giveth and taketh away thing going, but really? Prince at 57? I think you can do better. My best friend cried for two solid days about Prince. Are you happy you made her do that? This is one of those losses — like John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and John John Kennedy — that will make us all remember exactly where we were and what we were doing when we heard the news. I, for one, was having my brain examined in a workshop with my coworkers. You don’t want to know the results. And learning that Prince had just died didn’t help matters at all.

Why don’t you take out someone whom we’d be better off without, like Ted Cruz? Take that idiot now, and give us back Prince. Hell, (Oops! Sorry again!), take Tom Cruise. Take him and all the rest of the Scientologists. We don’t need them.

Mark Milstein | Dreamstime.com

Prince

Oh, dear. I can hear my phone ringing and email pinging now. The last time I mentioned the Scientologists, just in passing, their public relations person at the celebrity center in Nashville contacted me. Apparently, someone in Collierville (Collierville!) turned me in. Who would have thought there were Scientologists in Collierville?

She was all unnerved because I made a crack about them and told me I should call her if I wanted to find out what Scientology was really all about. So I told her, “Look, I had to deal with you people for years when Isaac Hayes was still alive, and you people are freaks. Don’t try giving me the runaround, because I know you, and not one of you is able to explain this without lying through your teeth.”

I don’t think she was too thrilled. I wonder if that’s why I found a dead rat in my bedroom the other morning. No, that was a gift from my tomcat, who also knocked over my flat-screen television (I finally got one!) the other day and caused me to crack a rib trying to catch it before it hit the floor. So now I have a torn intercostal muscle in one side of my ribs and a cracked rib on the other side. AND I have a spider bite on my arm. I’m falling apart. I have high blood pressure, low blood sugar, tendinitis, sinusitis, carpal and ulnar tunnel in my wrists, arthritis, vertigo while driving, degenerative disc disease, horrible allergies, dry eye syndrome, acid reflux, anxiety disorder, and a cyst the size of a fig on my elbow. But at least I have a tomcat!

I also have a handwritten letter on my office wall from former United States ambassador to Germany, Philip D. Murphy, which opens with the salutation, “Dear TimCat.” I kid you not. It ends with the line, “You make me so proud to be an American!” Yes, he underlined it. Can you believe that? He wrote me the letter (by hand!) a few years ago after I took some Stax Music Academy students to Berlin to perform for him and a lot of other people, AND he cried after they performed. So there.

But back to my open letter to God about Prince. Why would you take such a sweet, handsome, fashionable, shy musical genius from us and let all of these terrorists and Republicans stick around to drive us nuts? Is this some kind of a bizarre test? Why not take Donald Trump? Good Lord (Oops! Sorry again!). You’re going to let someone with that hair stay alive and take Prince away from us? Have you even heard “When Doves Cry”? Well, the doves are sobbing their guts out now, so thanks for nothing.

Why not take Marie Osmond, the most frightening person ever to walk this insane planet? Oh, wait. You may have created this planet. Sorry. But if you did, you could still do better. Look at Houston. All flooded. Oh, sorry. There’s no flooding anymore; it’s “ponding.” When did flooding become “ponding”?

ARE YOU UP THERE? If you are, what are you doing? Deciding which genius musician to take out next? We not only want Prince back, but we also want Alex Chilton as well. We’ll give you Ted Cruz, Tom Cruise, Donald Trump, Marie Osmond, AND Taylor Swift if you’ll give us back Prince, Alex Chilton, Isaac Hayes, Maurice White, Bobby Blue Bland, David Bowie, and Merle Haggard. Sound like a deal?

Categories
Letter From The Editor Opinion

Medium Cool

We’re reading and hearing a lot about “electability” these days, which is broadly defined as “fitness or ability to get elected to public office.” That covers a lot of Tarmac, to say the least. For example, ingrained party affiliations, gerrymandering, and family or religious affiliations can make a candidate electable for state or local office, but he or she may have little electability in a national contest.

Witness Texas Senator Ted Cruz. Anyone with a minimal ability to read character can see that he’s, well, just creepy. He has a base of right-wing, evangelical voters and not much else. His chances of winning 51 percent of the voters in a national contest are nil. Cruz could easily be president of Utah and the Confederacy, but unfortunately for him, the rest of the country still exists.

The bottom line is, Cruz lacks “cool,” and cool wins elections. And by cool, I mean, basically, being comfortable in your own skin. President Obama has been the coolest president of my lifetime. He smiles and laughs a lot. He doesn’t get flustered in public. He doesn’t gratuitously insult or flatter. His speaking pattern is masterful, full of seemingly thoughtful pauses that lead to complete sentences. You may not like what he says, but he says it well. Our next president will not be as cool.

Oh, sure, other factors are important — competency, experience — but I’m convinced that cool, or its corollary, “likability,” is how we most often elect our president. In a national election, you need to win across a broad landscape, millions of people of all ethnicities and political persuasions, a large percentage of whom, unfortunately, are not particularly well-versed on the issues. It’s been said, ad nauseum, that voters are drawn to someone they could “sit down and have a beer with.” And it’s true, especially in this era of 24-hour media coverage, where candidates are exposed to public scrutiny as never before. If you’re not cool, you can’t hide it.

Reagan was cooler than Carter and Mondale. George H.W. Bush was cooler than Dukakis (though there was something of a coolness deficit in that contest). Bill Clinton was cooler than the elder Bush and Dole. Like it or not, George W. Bush was cooler than Gore or Kerry, who were smart, but stiffs. And, it goes without saying, John McCain and Mitt Romney were no match for Obama’s cool.

Bernie Sanders is the coolest of the remaining candidates. It’s a crotchety cool, but he comes off as authentic. Hillary Clinton is not cool. She is, by her own admission, “not a good politician,” and her speaking style, while substantive, can be abrasive and mannered. Fortunately, if she gets the nomination, she’ll probably be going up against the uncoolest candidate of my lifetime — Donald Trump.

Trump is a siding salesman, full of bluster and insults, with no coherent national or foreign policy positions that anyone’s been able to discern, unless you consider, “We never win. When I’m president, we’re going to win” some sort of policy.

Non-doctrinaire swing voters look for likability, certainly, but if they can’t have that, they look for competence and sanity. And they don’t want an uncool jerk as president. As Jeb(!) Bush said to Trump, “You can’t insult your way to the presidency.” Trump has basically insulted himself out of the presidency, turning vast constituencies against himself and his party. The last poll I saw had Trump’s unfavorability rating among likely voters at 67 percent! If the Republicans nominate Trump (or Cruz), they’re looking at a Goldwater-level wipeout election, no matter who the Democrats select.

Hopefully, such a result would make Trump go away for good — which would be cool with me.

Categories
Editorial Opinion

Post-Super Tuesday Thoughts

As longtime Flyer readers know, we don’t endorse candidates at election time, and didn’t on the occasion of this week’s presidential primary in Tennessee. But we do have some opinions. By now Super Tuesday is over, you’ve already voted, and we invite you to join us for a little bit of post-election armchair-quarterbacking:

On the Republican side, is there an alternative to Donald Trump?

There are things we find attractive about Ohio Governor John Kasich, who seems unique among the GOP contenders in that he appears to be both an experienced administrator and a pragmatic centrist, not a trash talker, a negativist, or a partisan demagogue. But maybe the punditocracy has it right: Only the Mambo Brothers, right-wing Senator Ted Cruz or former Tea Party darling and now ad hoc establishmentarian Senator Marco Rubio are serious alternatives to Trump.

The trouble with Trump, when you get down to it, is that he has no fixed principles. Like a hypocritical preacher, he can preach the world round or he can preach it flat. He can be free-trade or protectionist, pro-choice or pro-life, “liberal” or “conservative.” In one campaign, he can rebuke Mitt Romney for advocating self-deportation of illegal immigrants; in another campaign, his own, he can advocate forced deportation on a massive scale. He is what you want him to be, and he wants everybody to want him to be something, namely, president of the United States. That, we hazard, is why he had so much trouble repudiating David Duke to Jake Tapper on CNN once he’d heard that Duke had endorsed him. He’d want the Miley Cyrus vote, too, if he thought he could get it.

Trump is all over the map. That said, we wonder if that gives Rubio and Cruz, who restrict themselves more or less to one side of the map, the reactionary one, any claim to superiority over Trump. The Donald tries to go along to get along. He will, for example, give lip service to the GOP shibboleth that “Obamacare” should be abolished, but he hints that he might replace it with something amorphous that sounds like universal health care. There is no such ambivalence on the part of Rubio and Cruz; they would insist on a full return to the Darwinian system of health-to-the-highest-bidder medical rationing.

And on the Democratic side, is there any alternative to Hillary Clinton? 

We find much to admire in Secretary Clinton. She is strong, determined, and resourceful (all adjectives that she earned all over again in her redoubtable 11-hour standoff of a GOP lynching party at last fall’s Benghazi hearing). A little too calculating sometimes, and almost clam-like in her self-containment, but she’s smart and vetted, and her heart is in the right place — or near it — on numerous humanitarian and social issues. 

In fact, she seems right on so many things that we find it frustrating that she can’t be as simple and direct and, as they say, proactive on the issue of economic inequality as Bernie Sanders can. And because he can, frankly, we’d just as soon the Democratic contest went on long enough for the right kind of osmosis to occur between her point of view and his. Regardless of which one wins.

Categories
Politics Politics Beat Blog

Trump Day in Millington

The approach to the Millington Jetport Hangar, where Donald Trump was to speak on Saturday evening, was a long, slow crawl for miles of automobiles bumper-to-bumper. It had the look of Woodstock to it, and, at 5:45 p.m., the car queues were being diverted away from the main approaches by uniformed local officers of various kinds and onto a back road that emptied directly onto the tarmac. From there it was a not-too-longish trek by foot through a gated area where peddlers a-plenty were selling Trump paraphernalia and finally, through metal-processing points into the hangar.

Uncharacteristically for the presidential campaigns in this election year (and unlike Trump’s once or twice in New Hampshire when the snows fell hard), this event conformed fairly closely to the advance schedule. At roughly 6 p.m., the appointed time, Trump’s big private jet taxied up close to the massive hangar’s open area, where a speaking platform had been set up, and the huge crowd inside the hangar, easily numbering several thousand, let up a roar, simultaneous with the raising of a host of cell-phone cameras to capture the event.

There had been rumors that Trump would have a surprise guest, and, sure enough, down the ramp, along with Trump came New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, the recent presidential-campaign dropout whose endorsement of Trump on Friday had somewhat offset that day’s other big news meme, his brutal tag-team mugging by opponents Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz in Friday’s Republican debate in Houston, broadcast by CNN.

Even as Trump and his new bromance bud strode up to the speaking stand, the continually building roar gave sufficient proof that The Donald had lost no luster among these masses, a packed-in assembly of just-folks Americana, largely white to be sure, but otherwise running across various class, gender, and age lines, from cap-and-jeans blue-collarites to a generously sized section for people in wheel chairs to the likes of Steve Ehrhart, the dapper Liberty Bowl exec who pointed out that he had grown acquainted with Trump in New York, presumably in the course of some deal that must have redounded to the benefit of both.

Christie spoke first, issuing some preliminary blasts at Rubio and Cruz and making it clear to the crowd that his endorsement of Trump was something more than that, it was an enlistment in the same cause that had attracted the thousands of attendees.

And then there was Trump. It was the usual philippic, mixing boasts, such as a claim that “every poll” had shown that he had won “every debate” with his rivals with familiar insults of those rivals, especially of “little Marco” — depicted by Trump as a quivering, sweaty-wet about-ready-to-pass-out “choke artist” whom he had spotted overtly leaguing with Cruz in a conspiratorial handshake before Thursday’s debate — and a distancing of himself from the rest of the field, too, indeed from the whole of the GOP establishment, with a claim that he was ever “the nicest person” on any stage with any of them and proudly boasting that he was creating a new Republican Party, indeed a new American consensus, including Democrats and independents as well.

The crowd, which was plainly not the usual muster of political junkie-dom (though any number of local GOP regulars could be spotted here and there) was uproariously with him on all of this, chanting “Win! Win! Win!” along with Trump and delighting also in his disparaging of the ex-Mexican president Vincente Fox who had famously said on Fox News that Mexico would not pay for the “faw-king” wall Trump says he’ll build on the border. The crowd rejoiced at Trump’s mockery of Fox and his tut-tutting at the “f-bomb” usage, and it suddenly became possible to imagine this and future such crowds hailing threats against uppity nations, near and far, that might go beyond the employment of bricks and mortar and electric wire.

Not that Trump, who for the record is much more non-interventionist in a military sense than his fellow GOP contenders, sounded any violent note per se. Indeed, when, as often happens at one of his rallies, a protester began to chant against him from inside the hangar, he calmly directed the crowd to “get him out” but “don’t hurt him.” And so the crowd did, with its counter-chant morphing from “Trump! Trump! Trump!” to “Win! Win! Win!”And finally to “U.S.A.! U.S.A! U.S.A!”

Call it what else you will, but this is a movement.

Meanwhile, Rubio and Cruz, building on what they must have imagined to have been the great gains of the debate, were releasing their tax returns over the weekend in the apparent belief that they could shame Trump thereby and embarrass him in the eyes of the American electorate.

It was hard to imagine such a thought crossing the minds of those in these approving multitudes. In fact, it was absurd to think they would side with the battling Mambo Brothers or the IRS against their new idol — or hold him blameful for possibly gaming a system that has done them no favors.

Could Trump, as he had boasted, actually get away with shooting someone at high noon on Fifth Avenue? With these supporters, he might. Not with the law, but — to say it again — Trump is come not to uphold the law but to abolish it.

Finally, there was the after-speech rope line, with Trump spending serious person-to-person time with each beseecher that handed him a cap or a poster or even an American flag to sign or smiling for the inevitable selfie. All the while there were desperate cries of “Mr. Trump! Mr. Trump!” from people trapped behind secondary rope lines further back, still hopeful, despite evidence to the contrary, that they, too, might get close enough to touch or be touched.

 

And then, finally, he was aboard the plane and gone, off on his quest to Make America Great Again, no doubt secure in his conviction that the minions he left behind in the Memphis area would go to the polls on Super Tuesday, just three days away, and do the right thing by him.